Catch of the Day

All these poems
don’t come from a teaspoon
sipped from a lake.
It’s closer to a net
a patched and ragged
net hauled up from the ocean–
Here’s the fact that
you’re going to die
and so am I,
but it’s tangled up
with my student’s earnest
face as he described how
to catch a mole with bare hands
and where in the wild
to set it free
And that’s mixed with
grocery lists, clean socks,
stray strand of tinsel,
whether or not
to buy a truck,
fresh eggs, phone bills,
and green mysteries
sprouting in our garden
and that bird, the one
singing right this second
Outside, in the dark